


all her broken parts (are all her sharpest swords)

by MashpotatoeQueen5



Series: The Problem With Galas [6]
Category: Batgirl (Comics), Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: And came back, And mostly to minor characters, And that is bound to mess people up, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Batfamily Feels, Blood and Injury, Blood and Torture, Blood and Violence, Bruce Wayne Has Issues, Bruce Wayne is Batman, Bruce Wayne is a Good Parent, Bruce Wayne is intensely awkward, But I don't know her very well, College Life, Dad Bruce Wayne, Dealing with Emotions, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Galas, Galas are horrible, Gen, Growing, He collects children like some people collect buttons, Hurt/Comfort, I Tried, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, I have no idea where in the timeline this takes place in, Mentions of Blood, Nothing says emotional bonding like midnight conversations on a washing machine, Or at least she was, Panic Attacks, Past Stephanie Brown/Tim Drake, So apologies if this is off, Socialites - Freeform, Stephanie Brown died, Stephanie Brown is Batgirl, Stephanie Brown is Robin, Stephanie Brown is Spoiler, Stephanie Brown is doing her best, Stephanie Brown is in College, Stephanie is so strong, They all have so many issues oh my gods, Timeline? What Timeline?, Triggers, Trust Issues, and all flashbacks, and i love her so much, batclan, being a bat is hard, but its blink and you'll miss it, its like a hobby, just super super slowly, or at least he's trying, or stamps, really - Freeform, they're figuring things out
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-23
Updated: 2019-02-23
Packaged: 2019-11-04 05:09:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17892089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MashpotatoeQueen5/pseuds/MashpotatoeQueen5
Summary: Galas are an issue, because something always goes wrong, and no one knows this better than Stephanie Brown. (It's a bit of a problem, actually, but she can depend on Bruce to get her out of trouble.)In which Stephanie is eighteen, showing up at galas to shoot Bruce the middle finger and eat free food, dealing with life and college and capes the best she can, Bruce is trying very hard to make up for the past in his own awkward way, and there is a glass of spilled wine.They figure things out, eventually.





	all her broken parts (are all her sharpest swords)

**Author's Note:**

> Spoiler (heh) Alert: I haven't had the opportunity to read many of Stephanie's comics, so this may suck and be out of character. Whelp. I tried.
> 
> Also, this is rather experimental, and written at one in the morning. But I think I like it.
> 
> Ah well....
> 
> Read the warnings and take care of yourselves!

Stephanie Brown always liked being the center of attention.

Maybe it was because as a child, there had never been enough attention to go around.

Or maybe it was because she liked playing with it, the way it glanced off her skin, the way she could make it change and shimmer with a quirk of her lips or a quip of the mouth. The way it was so malleable, how she could control it when everything else in her life up to this point had been beyond her grasp.

Maybe.

Her skin was made of marble. She chose what creation it would become, the way her mask could fit around her features and harden into stone armour around vulnerable scars.

Stephanie Brown always liked being the center of attention, unless she wasn’t in the mood, and then she’ll disappear to the corner of your eyes, a flash of gold in your peripheral vision, an echoing bark of laughter from no discernable place or time.

Some nights, she was standing in the spotlights, dazzling and blonde and spinning across the room at a dizzying pace. Some nights, she would grin too bright and too real in the face of politicians and socialites and display her arms and her legs and all her little scars and bruises, displaying her history of a life in poorer neighborhoods and ‘uneducated’ manners through the marks on her skin and the tilt of her smile, screaming to the world in a way Tim would never quite be able to replicate, would never quite be able to understand, screaming about how  _ This is me, this is me, and you can’t change me, can’t shame me, can’t break me down- _

Tonight is not one of those nights. Tonight Stephanie was quiet, she talked, she chattered, she looked into the eyes of men four times her age with that unwavering gaze until they excused themselves or broke, but she would not be loud about it. People would remember her-  _ she’s one of those figures who are hard to forget-  _ but only in passing, that strong girl with little white lines traced into her skin and long blonde hair.

She first showed up at the side of Timothy Drake, no connections, no money to her name, no social status to speak of. She showed up with bandages on her knuckles and a second hand dress she had bought the night before, a clashing eggplant colour that made Tim laugh and trade with her small secret glances that made her feel like no other attention in the world would ever be necessary, not when she had this.

She showed up glaring and clashing and  _ loud,  _ and when people looked down on her she stuck her chin up, her every feature made of stone, and nothing could penetrate her, break her, or push her down.

(Sometimes, late at night and all alone, when the bruises ache and the cuts sting and the silence makes her want to scream just to make something  _ real,  _ she will think back to that feeling and try to plaster it onto her skin, to carve it into her bones.)

People have always looked down on her, if they ever bothered to look at her at all.

She showed up, and through the grit of her teeth and the strength of her grasping, scrambling fingers, she never quite left.

Stephanie Brown was carved out of marble. She was carved out of drunk fights echoing from a kitchen long ago in need of repair, out of a father never home and a mother swallowing pills instead of dealing with the world around her. She was carved from late night conversations on old creaking swing sets and secrets kept and secrets told, out of a costume made with her own two hands and a hand-me-down title that had her dressed in reds and greens and golds. She was carved from Cluemaster and manipulation and broken and rebuilt trust, from a lifetime of being shattered down to nothing but her own will to live, from  _ dying,  _ from being brought back from places where no one should ever really go.

Stephanie Brown was carved out of marble. She was a masterpiece of broken parts. She was a lioness cornered in a cage, outnumbered ten to one, still fighting.

(Stephanie Brown told herself these things when her own thoughts got too loud for her own head to handle, when the world turned against her again and again and again, when everything inside of her was clashing and angry and sad and alone and afraid and  _ bright.) _

This particular gala was particularly awful. There was something about rich snobs that always rubbed her the wrong way, that made her hackles rise. She hated how impossible relaxing felt in Wayne Manor, with its towering columns and glaring chandeliers, the way that so much space felt crushing, weighing down on her with no room left to breathe.

She breathed anyways. 

Perhaps she was just tired. Riddler escaped last night, had planted bombs all over Gotham and had led the whole Batclan on a wild dash across Gotham, defusing bombs and following riddles and dealing with a seemingly endless amount of thugs. Her ankle was throbbing at her from where she had sprained it on a miscalculated leap out of the way of bullet spray, but the pain relievers she had thrown back a few hours ago were finally kicking in.

A middle aged woman did a double take at her white suit, at the paint smatters on it, marking it with blues and greens and yellows and pinks and purples, a result of one too many late night study sessions of a college course that she kept missing the class of, kept playing catch up on because villains didn’t just stop because of an eight AM class.

She had been frustrated. She had been tired. The suit was too blank and her mind was too full, and the paint was lying abandoned in a cupboard from that one time her mother thought she might take it up as a hobby, and throwing splatters against the too pure brightness in an alleyway in the middle of the night was somehow soothing.

(The red paint still sat dusty on the shelf: she saw enough of the color staining material dark in her night job, and wearing a suit that reminded her of blood didn’t sound appealing in the slightest.)

Tim had asked her once, feet swinging over the edge of a building twenty stories up, back when his eyes were less tired and the weight on his shoulders weighed less heavy, when things were not so complicated and convoluted, why she went to the things if she hated them so much.

She had told him she came for the food. It was a lie, and he probably knew it, because at the time she came because he was there, and seeing him look at her like an equal and a competent meant more than any words could express.

Now, she was pretty sure she came so that every time Bruce saw her, she could flash him the middle finger.

And so that she could make Tim laugh, because god knows that the other teen needs it.

(Traffic cone colours and a legacy that was never meant to be hers, not really. She and Tim shared that, in a way, because Batman did not ask for him to be Robin, either. But the difference was that Tim eventually was embraced into the fold and Stephanie never quite managed.)

Finding the other boy was easy. Dragging him away from whatever politician or celebrity he was talking to at the time was harder, but when words failed she simple grabbed on to the back of his suit and yanked him in a new direction by force.

He scowled at her, raising and eyebrow. She shrugged.

“Dance with me.”

He made a show of it, sighing before dramatically offering his hand to her, but she knew that he was probably relieved to be free of the false pleasantries and fake smiles. She  _ knew  _ him, the way he worked, the way he thought, or at least as much as anyone could understand him.

Or maybe she knew some younger version of him. She didn’t remember the bags under his eyes being this deep, didn’t remember so many blank gazes, or the way sometimes that pretend smile wouldn’t slip off his face even when he was directing it at her.

Either way, it was enough, it had to be enough, and they danced.

She didn’t know how, but she went for it anyway, cursing when she stepped on his feet and whooping when he spun and dipped her, cheerfully doing the same back to him. 

In the end, she didn’t get any laughter from him, but his smile did become more real.

(Once upon a time, maybe, in another universe where Stephanie was not so weary of trust and so tired of secrets and Tim was not so battered and emotionally isolated, perhaps they could have worked it out, could have made themselves great.)

(She didn’t know. Didn’t rightly care. She fell in and out of love like tides upon a sandy shore, and even if she no longer felt for him in that way it never stopped them from holding each other up and keeping each other grounded, never stopped them from spinning around a ballroom like two ten years olds hiked up on sugar and adrenaline and imaginations full of happy endings where everything works itself out.) 

Later, later, and Tim was called away to help figure out some coding and help deal with Penguin, and Stephanie charged through the crowds like a bull horn, distracting them from his sudden absence, loud and obnoxious and annoying.

(She caught sight of Bruce watching her from one of his many piles of eager women. She flashed him the finger, and was the only one to recognize the small nod that occurred immediately after to be one of recognition.)

The rich folks leer at her, look down at her, and Stephanie refused to back down, refused to feel small.

(Batman had looked down at her, once, had told her to go home. She had stuck her chin up at him, too, and stayed.)

It happened completely by accident. She turned to avoid to bumping into someone, and another socialite had smashed right into her because of it, glass of red wine sloshing over the rim and all over the suit.

She looked down at it. 

Red on white, seeping quick and deep, all down her front.

She breathed, breathed.

_ How many times-  _

Just last night, a little girl had bled out under her hands, a bullet wound to the chest and nothing she could do but wait for an ambulance that came too late. Two nights ago, rivulets of red had poured down a lanky fifteen year old’s nose, the blood dripping onto his tattered clothes as he sobbed like it hurt to breathe, curled into himself and shaking all over, his accoster laying crumpled in the alleyway behind them. A week ago, an old woman hit by a car, gasping in pain as frail old bones snapped in all the wrong ways. Two weeks ago, Nightwing, smiling at her with bloodied teeth even as his eyes rolled to the back of his head and he collapsed, convulsing.

Her own knuckles, every night, bloody and bruised. Knife cuts. Bullet wounds. Concussions and skinned knees.

_ Blood dribbling from her lips as it rose from her throat, escaping her in wet coughs that rattled her entire chest, pain from broken bones and endless torture collapsing over her in waves, the soft, scratchy feelings of white sheets underneath her, the sight of them quickly turning red, the feel of Batman’s grip in her own, her own voice, echoing, echoing- _

_ “Was I a good Robin?” _

_ “Of course you were,”  _ he had told her, broken and tired and ashamed, “ _ of course you were,”  _ and they had both been squeezing each other’s hands too tight, even as she had slipped into oblivion.

Red on white, red on white,  _ how many times- _

(One time a small child had asked her if it hurt, to die, and his eyes were so big and pained and broken. Stephanie had told him that it was easier than anything else she had ever done, and the relief in his smile would haunt her for years to come.) 

She breathed, breathed.

All her broken parts were simply sharp broken pieces for her to wield as weapons. She was made of marble and her rough edges just added to her masterpiece.

She closed her eyes, opened them, refocused on the world around her, on the young man apologizing to her.

“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Seriously.”

The words came out mechanical and clipped, and her fingers curled into the edge of the suit jacket, felt the way the liquid coated her palms when she squeezed, and felt sick to her stomach.

_ How many times- how many times- _

And then Bruce came stumbling into the circle, loud and obnoxious and annoying, and only she could see the small way he gestured at her, indicating that he had this covered, that she could go.

She didn’t bother giving a nod back, just stepped away and away and away until she disappeared, the only trace of her ever being there a few drips of pale red on the tiled ballroom floor. 

The man found her later, sitting on top of the washing machine and perusing her phone, wearing only her boxers and one of Tim’s old shirts. She would be embarrassed, but he’s seen her in less- when your in the business, medical emergencies take precedence over prudity- and in all honesty she was too tired to care. 

“It won’t wash out.”

She hummed, flitted to another image.

“Hello to you too, Bruce.”

“It was a white suit. It won’t wash out. Especially with all that paint.”

She grunted.

Silence.

For all that Stephanie loved to stomp on eggshells, she and Bruce danced around each other in an ever precarious balancing act. He felt guilty, she felt tired, he wanted her to stop hero work, she never stopped lifting her chin and refusing.

They were different, maybe, in ways that made them like magnetic poles. He pushed it all in like it was the only thing left to ground him and she pushed it all out like it was the only thing that could stop her from flying.

He could never understand that Stephanie became her own hero in a world that pushed her past the breaking point too many times, and no one had ever saved her.

It didn’t help that Bruce was a fundamentally incredibly awkward person, who tucked so much away he sometimes forgot how to even let anything out at all, including emotions.

(Sometimes, Stephanie thought she forgave him. Sometimes, she hated him more than even Cluemaster. Most of the time, she found that she had trouble caring, not when there was so much of everything else in her life to deal with, not when she had long ago learned to put herself first because anything else meant becoming nothing more that marbled dust.)

“It’s the principle of the thing.”

Bruce nodded. Stood perfectly still. In most people, that would probably translate into someone balancing on their heels, wavering forwards and wavering back.

She sighed, patted the spot next to her.

“C’mon, then.”

He sat besides her, stilted. 

It made her smile, the comedy of it all: Bruce was a big man, and he looked out of place and almost small in the sterile white washing room.

They didn’t say anything. There weren’t really any words left to say. Stephanie was a girl made of marble long before Batman and Robin and all that came with it, all they did was smooth out some edges and shatter some others. 

And all of her broken parts were her sharpest swords, so she supposed she couldn’t complain much.

The machine stopped. She got off and dumped the clothes into the dryer, frowning at the pale remnants of colours, the red stain still glaring angrily up at her.

_ It’s the principle of the thing,  _ she repeated to herself, and slammed the door shut to start the cycle.

Twenty minutes of silence later, she took the clothes out and put them in a laundry basket. She needed to steal some pants from Tim’s room, to get back to her apartment and finish off an essay. She should probably patrol.

Halfway out the door, though, she stopped, could feel Bruce’s stare at the back of her shoulder blades, wondered if his eyes were tracing scars.

“Thank you,” she said, haltingly, because Bruce wasn’t the only one who had trouble with being sincere with their emotions, “for what you did back there. I didn’t need help but- yeah.”

Bruce didn’t say anything. 

She wasn’t expecting him to, and walked out the door with her arms full of ruined suit.

Two days later, she found a carton full of different paints sitting on her kitchen counter, enough to cover any stain. She grinned- something sharp and something fierce and something just a little broken and just a little healed- rolled her eyes, grabbed the suit from where it was tucked away in her closet and headed down to the alleyway.

Perhaps they would never understand each other, she and Bruce, not where it counted.

Perhaps that didn’t matter.

She splattered paint on material meant to be solid and pure, and smoothed out some new edges of her ever changing masterpiece.

Stephanie Brown was carved out of a lifetime of broken parts. It never stopped her from creating something new, from smoothing over rough edges of marble and starting anew, from meeting the gaze of a world that pushed her down and raising her chin against it, from dancing in crowded ballrooms like she still believed in happy endings.

Who knew? 

Maybe she did.

Maybe this was her learning to start.

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed. :)


End file.
